Review

“Homeland Security Advisory Signal” is a towering sculpture, a sort of monolith of the information-age, tridimensionally reproducing the “Homeland Security Advisory System”, a colour-coded alert signal representing the current risk of terrorist attacks on the American soil. The topic is sadly contemporary. However, Lo Monaco’s latest work wants to be something more than a provocation that rides the latest wave of events. Reconstructing in the shape of a sculpture the "Homeland Security Advisory System”, the artist places a series of questions on some ideological and ethical issues of this beginning of the millennium. As during the times of the aerial bombings there were loud sirens that informed the population of the imminent danger, today new instruments and new references for our times of invisible war are necessary. Instruments exactly like the “Homeland Security Advisory Signal”, offer to the population an explicit and direct representation of the current dangers and the threats existing in our environment. The point is that the light-signal of terrorism is only apparently explicit. In realty it is an obscure and conflicting object. The population is not informed on the criteria and the standards used in order to decide if the signal has to remain blue, orange or to become red and suggest the maximum alert level. Beyond that of information, the signal is an instrument of persuasion, a means of rhetoric that must make us reflect on the grammar of communication, all aspects on which Lo Monaco artistically investigates. The language used by the “Homeland Security Advisory Signal” is Manichaean, it invites to emotional reactions rather than to reasoning and conclusively it uses the same codes of fear and anger used by terrorism. The “Homeland Security Advisory Signal” is therefore a perfect example of a post-modern monolith. Mysterious, indecipherable, invested from above of a powerful religious content, able to assemble the masses and to control their behaviours.